Posts in category Peter Noorderijk

Only forty days to go for the next Experts Live event! This year we have an amazing line up again with tracks about:

Windows Server

Azure

Hyper-V

System Center

Office 365

PowerShell

SQL

More than forty sessions! This time the event will be hosted in Cinemec in Ede.

We from Hyper-V.nu may give away two tickets that gives you free entrance to this event. If you want to win one of these tickets you have to write a tweet explaining why anyone should attend Experts Live using the hashtag #Hypervnu #ExpertsLive. The tweet must be posted between October 8th and 15th.

As we can read in this blog: Status on 6/19/2014: Updated driver and firmware code that addresses the VMQ network connectivity issues is currently going through comprehensive validation and test and is estimated to be available for Emulex branded products by mid-July 2014. Driver releases of specific OEM configurations are being evaluated now. We will update this blog as soon as we confirm the timing and location of each OEM release.

That’s good news! Let’s hope that this update will be available as soon as possible and that this update will fix the VMQ issue!

I think that we all remember the day: 27th of August 2013. On this day Microsoft announced that Windows Server 2012 R2 has been released to manufacturing. This means that Microsoft handles over the software to their hardware partners for them to complete their final system validation.

Back in those days I was involved in a project for upgrading a Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V environment to Windows Server 2012 R2. We started the project with a design phase and after that a POC phase. Although this was all successfull we could not continue to implement Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V to production because there was no support for Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V from out the backup solution used. The backup solution in place is: HP Dataprotector.

Positive as we are we asked HP if Dataprotector will support Windows Server 2012 R2 the next month or the month after that. HP told us that we must be a little patient but in November there will be an announcement. That announcement was quite dissapointing: HP Dataprotector support for Windows Server 2012 R2 (including Hyper-V) will be available in January 2014

Hey, but we are patient! So we sit back and wait…

January 2014: Release of HP Dataprotector version 8.1, However without support for Windows Server 2012 R2! HP told us that they could not make it this time but support for Windows Server 2012 R2, with Hyper-V, will be available in April 2014!

April 2014: Release of HP Dataprotector version 8.11… with support for Windows Server 2012 R2!!! So we could continue our project… no just kidding, we couldn’t! Although there is support for Windows Server 2012 R2, there is no support for Hyper-V. Astonishment and dander all around. We got the feeling that we be kept on a leash. HP told us very friendly that they do not expect support for Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V before September 2014.

Let’s hope it will be earlier than September. HP promised us to support Hyper-V 2012 R2 in the future and in a futured version. When this will be? I’ve no idea and I’m afraid that HP also not having a idea right now.

Unfortunately this is not the only frustration, a lot of customers are waiting for the final release of Lefthand OS 11, features like ODX (in 3PAR) are not working well and so I can continue this story.

5nine Cloud Security for Hyper-V is the first and only agentless anti-malware and virtual firewall solution for the Windows Server Hyper-V, utilizing the flexibility of Hyper-V Extensible Switch. Enterprises and cloud providers can:

“In line with Microsoft’s longstanding and deep commitment to security, Windows Server 2012 R2 with Hyper-V was designed to the highest security standards,” said Chris Van Wesep, Group Product Marketing Manager, Microsoft. “Building on that security foundation, 5nine Software has a long history of delivering enhanced security solutions for Microsoft platforms. Now, 5nine Cloud Security provides multi-tenant SDN security along with VM isolation and agentless antivirus for Hyper-V environments.”

New 5nine Cloud Security 4.0 for Hyper-V features:

Secure multi-tenancy and VM isolation

Virtual Machine security groups and cloud tenant security

User/roles access that allows users or user groups to manage only objects associated with them

Agentless antivirus for Hyper-V hosts and real-time protection for VMs

Hyper-V.nu has been around since 2008. A lot of content has been added to the blog since then. Many hours of research and writing form the basis for that. Our site has been running in a hosted VM, managed by Jaap Wesselius since 2008.

We know some Hyper-V, System Center, CloudOS. But this WordPress….. that is a different story. MySQL database, PHP and all other scary stuff. With Jaap leaving Hyper-V.nu we were doomed to manage and troubleshoot the site our own.

We needed a new strategy. We needed a solid foundation with as little WordPress to manage as possible and with an infrastructure we understand. The answer was easy. We needed Windows Azure.

After numerous evenings of testing and a lot of troubleshooting to cleanup some legacy issues in the (now old) environment. We are proud to announce that we succesfully migrated Hyper-V.nu to Windows Azure.

Combined with the migration we changed the layout of the site. We hope you enjoy the new look and feel of hyper-v.nu R2.

All preparations were done (like: Marcs blog). PXE boot went well, deep discovery went well, image was succesfully deployed but then the process stuck on step 1.2.12 (Wait for physical machine to reboot and customization to be finished 0%).

When we manually join the host to the domain the step resume to 50% and stops then again. So computer name or IP address is not yet set. An IP address is already claimed from the IP pool but as I said not configured on an interface. Communication with the host is still possible.

After a lot of trial-and-error (manually register the host in DNS/ prestage computer account in AD/ use DHCP instead of IP from a pool and so on…) we replaced the Windows Server 2012 R2 OS image (stored in the SCVMM library) with a new fresh image (All Windows updates applied and firewall on all profiles disabled). Retried the operation and this time the bare metal deployment runs succesfull. We could not find a specific problem with the old OS image (we could succesfully use it for VM deployment) however when we use the image for bare metal deployment the process stuck on step 1.2.12.

So if you encounter this problem, replace your OS image in the SCVMM library with a new fresh image and retry the operation.

Last week I build a Generation 2 virtual machine (Windows Server 2012 R2) which I will be use as a virtual machine template in SCVMM 2012 R2. I build this virtual machine with SCVMM 2012 R2. After building and configuring the virtual machine I have converted the virtual machine to a template and stored the template on a library share.

As soon as the virtual machine was stored in the library I would like to deploy some virtual machines from this template. I started the deploy and I saw that the virtual machine was created succesfully. However during the template rollout the proces stops at step 1.4 (view from the “Jobs” tab):

I switched to the “Summary” view and there I saw the following Error: VMM cannot find the device or this device is not valid for a boot device.

In this post Marc van Eijk points out connectivity issues with VMs and vNICs. At random virtual machine or vNIC would loose connectivity completely. After a simple live migration the virtual machine would resume connectivity.

Marc has already logged a support case at Microsoft and HP and they are investigating this issue. Last week I also discovered this issue, here is my configuration:

Currently we experience network connectivity issues with one of our cluster networks in a Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V cluster environment.

We have configured a switch-independent NIC team with dynamic loadbalancing with 2 NIC team members. Upon this NIC team we have configured a vswitch.

In this vswitch we have created three vNICs of type Management OS:

– Management

– Live Migration

– Cluster CSV

Every NIC is configured in a separate VLAN. Only the Live Migration network may be used for Live Migration traffic (Configured in Windows Failover Clustering).

The initial installation and configuration of Hyper-V and the Windows Failover Cluster was OK. Over all the networks, communication between the hosts in the cluster was possible.

The Cluster Validation Wizard runs successfully without any warning or error.

After the installation of the Hyper-V cluster we start creating and installing the virtual machines. No problems at all, till we build a specific VM called VM06. This VM was created on the host Host01.

When the VM resides on this host everything is OK. As soon as we move this virtual machine (via Live Migration) to the host Host02 the cluster network called Live Migration went down and communication on this network between the two Hyper-V hosts is not possible anymore. When we move the virtual machine back to Host01 the cluster network called Live Migration comes back online. Also when we shut down the virtual machine when it resides on node Host02 the cluster network called Live Migration comes back online.

When we change the NIC teaming configuration to a Active/ Standby configuration, as Mark described in his blog, this network issue does not appear.

Microsoft requested us to disable Large Send Offloading: “Get-NetadapterLSO | Disabel-NetadapterLSO” (with NIC teaming in active/ active). However the issue is still there.

Update 11-26-2013 14:45: After disabling RSS and RSC (which does not change te situation) Hans suggest to disabling VMQ. We used PowerShell to disable VMQ on all interfaces: “Get-NetAdapterVmq | Disable-NetAdapterVmq” …. and yes disabling VMQ does the trick. Off course this is not a solution but only a workaround. These findings are logged in the case @ Microsoft and they will investigate this futher.

Update 12-02-2013 10:45: After applying update KB2887595-v2 to both of our Hyper-V nodes the network problems with our Live Migration network are gone. Even with VMQ enabled the network keeps up and running. However this update does fix the problem for our situation but not for the situation that Marc describes. So it seems that we’ve two different issues here.

We, Hans, Mark en me, will continue to investigate this issue and will update you on www.hyper-v.nu!